Ira Fistell: radio’s brilliant oddball

Ira Fistell has died. He was 81. For three decades Fistell was a nightly companion to thousands of Southern Californians as he hosted his radio show from 9 p.m. to Midnight on Talk Radio 790 KABC. Fistell’s show was a hodgepodge of often esoteric topics ranging from trains, Mark Twain, history, baseball, politics and pretty much anything else you can think of, although not so much pop culture. I’m not sure

Ira knew who Brittney Spears was.

And that’s the rub. A man who entertained a vast audience for decades was ultimately excommunicated from broadcasting for straying too far outside the zeitgeist. We are worse off for it.

I first heard Ira in New York when he was one of the early syndicated talk show hosts on the ABC Radio Network. When I moved to Los Angeles 30-plus years ago, I became a regular listener of his local show and eventually his colleague at KABC. His astonishing memory never ceased to amaze me. One night while guest co-hosting with Fistell, a caller asked how many perfect games had been thrown in Major League Baseball. Ira not only rattled off every one of the 23 perfect games, he also knew who threw them, who they were thrown against and the final score of each game. If I hadn’t seen him do it, I would have sworn he had to have a computer screen in front of him.

But Ira Fistell never had a computer in front of him. Ever.

Fistell stubbornly clung to the analog world he was born into, railing against the computer age, a radio Don Quixote tilling at the technology windmill until the demands of email and social media overwhelmed his career.

Ira Fistell’s radio program was a nighttime pleasure, a civil, respectful conversation with Southern California where the president was always “Mr. Reagan” or “Mr. Bush” or “Mr. Clinton,” a place where the eccentricities of the listeners and the host were not only tolerated, they were embraced. His oddballness was a big part of his appeal. Sadly, nobody in radio would hire Ira Fistell today, or anyone like him, even if you could find someone as interested and knowledgeable in so many aspects of humanity.

The entertainment industry is infamous for chasing the last hit. For radio, that hit was 35 years ago when Rush Limbaugh arrived in New York from Sacramento. The talk industry moved to the right and stayed there, becoming a monolith of nearly nonstop political chatter, with nearly identical opinions being spouted by nearly identical hosts. AM talk radio in particular became a 24/7/365 political soap box, where program hosts rarely strayed from the left/right battlefield. Ira

Fistell talked politics, too, but from a liberal perspective, sometimes socialist perspective, although he would never admit it.

In fairness to radio program directors and other media gods who make the hiring decisions, the market is much more competitive today than it was in Ira’s time, with literally a million alternatives fighting for the audience’s attention. Super-serving the base is not an ideological decision, rather a pragmatic business imperative. At least that’s what “research” tells them. A man as broad-based as Fistell simply didn’t fit the format of talk radio any more than Carrie Underwood fits the playlist at Power 106.

Sadly, Fistell’s reputation was marred by on horrific night. A car accident that claimed the life of a 15-year-old girl. This is also part of who he was. Ira did not cause the accident, the car hit his car, but he fled the scene in a panic and that stain remains. It’s part of his biography. Still, that awful night in an otherwise honorable life does not negate his six children, the books he wrote, the kids he taught, his gift as a raconteur, his enthusiasm for life, for America, and his commitment to polite and articulate expression of ideas and his life-long interest in people.

Where can I find that show today?